Although he was a qualified meteorologist, Hopkins ran up a terrible record of forecasting for the TV news programme. He became something of a local joke when a newspaper began keeping a record of his predictions and showed that he'd been wrong almost three hundred times in a single year.

That kind of notoriety was enough to get him fired.

He moved to another part of the country and applied for a similar job. But in the interview for the post, they asked him the one question he was dreading: "What was the reason for you leaving your last job?"